Money and Households in a Capitalist Economy (original) (raw)
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What is the place of the household in capitalism? Two generations ago, feminist scholars refuted economic notions that centered capitalism on the individual, demonstrating that industrial capitalism relied on the household for reproduction. But what about capitalism today? The rise of finance has subordinated production to financial profits and provoked states and corporations to slough off their duty to their citizens and workers. Haven’t these processes realized the individual that capitalism’s boosters have always envisioned at its core? To the contrary. Even though finance seems to elevate individual responsibility to new heights, financial capitalism remains deeply dependent on households, even as it obscures their significance.
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This article explores how financialized subjectivities have been performed in household economy manuals under two successive socioeconomic regimes in the former Czechoslovakia and the current Czech Republic: state socialism and neoliberal capitalism. Drawing on a layered performativity framework, we studied how rhetoric, devices and instructions used in manuals construct households into self-reliant actors who embrace financial products. We found that subjects were already being financialized by the manuals of the socialist era, particularly those from the 1980s. The main change concerned the treatment of temporality and the occurrence of calculative devices. Our findings challenge the idea that financialization has emerged under the regime of neoliberal capitalism and implies that financialization is part of a longer trend in modern economic governance.
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While we do not mean to imply that there are insurmountable or even clear distinctions between the social sciences, we claim that economists can still provide an original analysis of class, which should be regarded as complementary to those developed by sociologists. Following the tradition of British Classical economists, by a ‘economic approach’ we mean here the study of the production and distribution of income, that is of the conditions of societal survival and reproduction over time. From this perspective, a good deal of feminist literature has already shown the relevance of gender relations both at home and in the market.Thus, the aim of this work is to reopen the debate among economists (beyond the specific schools that already do) on the expediency of some form of joint class and gender analysis. We restrict the attention to the objective relations of production and distribution of income that is we abstract from individuals’ own understanding and representation of classes, ...
Constructing the Household Economy
The Libertarian Ideal, 2017
This essay looks at the problems surrounding the organisation of resistance amongst home-based workers. It investigates a variety of home-based worker movements and activist groups that are developing resistance through multiple different logics. The major problem for organisation currently emanates from the amount of control held over home-based workers by a combination of patriarchal household control and corporate centralisation which contracts and subcontracts out to households, integrating them as flexible production units in wider neo-Fordist forms of production and exchange. From this reality many discursive narratives are produced that legitimate the position of home-based workers in global supply chains. They are seen as micro-entrepreneurs or as a form of Westernised worker, who are in need of legal representation and regulatory apparatuses that provide stability while maintaining degrees of risk and flexibility. This masks the degrees of precariatisation these labour forces face. Thus resistance that overly focuses on the identity of home-based workers as ‘workers’ is problematic as such identities are still integrable to globalised production processes and corporate control. Instead, looking toward new ethical/value systems that develop a wider household political economy, like certain movements are already beginning to do, can develop new infrastructures and means of resistance against these centralised forms of control.